Various systems are known for the production of cast, hot rolled and heat treated products, such as bars or rods, and the like. However, such processes conventionally utilize off-line heat treating and metal processing facilities.
It has commonly been the practice to separate the caster and the rolling mill in order to enable product which has been prepared by a variety of preliminary processing procedures to be preliminarily processed and thereafter introduced to the rolling line. More recently, since the development of "hot charging" processes, it is known to provide transport means and storage devices for handling cut to length billets or blooms and to introduce them while hot to a heating furnace. While this practice saves energy and reduces the need for billet storage, it suffers the drawbacks of reduced material output due to the need for cropping the cast product into short lengths, the presence of short bars in the bed, and the generation of scale in the furnace.
Although several of these defects have been overcome by the method for the continuous casting of long products as described in European Patent Application No. EP 0 761 327 to Meroni, et al. and in a co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/315,844 entitled "Endless Casting Rolling System With Single Casting Stand" by the inventor hereof, both of which patent applications are assigned to the assignee hereof, the disclosed methods suffer from their own drawbacks in that the rolling mill is essentially dedicated to a single caster and casting line, and is therefore restricted to rolling speeds which conform substantially with the casting speed of product from the caster. Consequently not only may production output be reduced, but also limitations are imposed on the performance of the rolling mill.
It is to the amelioration of these drawbacks that the present invention is directed.